ELEVEN Snow It was snowing and it was going to snow. That was a line from a poem Rosie had been assigned sophomore year, but she couldn’t think of the name of the guy who wrote it. She could not think straight or remember simple things, she could only sit in the dark mutter of her mind, in full hatred and devastation of her parents and life. James and Lank had kidnapped her. She was going to be away for ninety days. It had taken thirteen hours to get to Utah in a car that Lank had rented because it had snow tires and a children’s safety lock to turn the backseat into a holding cell from which Rosie could not escape. They had gone east at Sacramento, cut across Nevada, and taken her to a renovated cabin in a small town somewhere north of Salt Lake City. She had slept or kept her eyes closed most of the time, but not when she was upset. They had arrived in a blizzard at night; there were four other silent, furious kids who’d arrived before her, and their parents and duffel bags, and bearded men with clipboards hovering around. A lady found Rosie’s name on a computer. Lank had stayed in the car. Rosie had turned her back on James when he tried to say good-bye and how much they loved her. “Fuck off,” she said. She was not allowed to speak to the other kids. They were offered lots of camping snacks, but no one accepted any. Then they were each given a ridiculous pack that weighed fifty pounds, according to the three male instructors, with a sleeping bag and a pad all wrapped up in a tarp that would also be their tent. A cooking tin, baggies of bulk food, a few pairs of dry socks, a journal, a pencil, zip-lock bags of sanitary pads and baby wipes for the girls, toothbrush and toothpaste were tied up into the tarp with what the instructors called p-cords. Rosie had gotten her birth control pills—you couldn’t just suddenly stop taking them, or your skin would break out, and the boy named Joel got his Zoloft. An instructor with a goatee escorted them outside and they started walking, just like that. There were three boys and one other girl. The p-cords cut into your shoulders and back. The other girl was screaming that she hated her parents, would never forgive them, and they’d never see her again when she got out. They hiked to a clearing where there was more dirt on the ground than snow, half an hour away, and then set up camp. One of the three instructors made a fire, and the other two helped the kids make tents with their tarps and low branches, thirty feet apart from one another. She woke in the wilds before dawn, stunned beyond stunned, enraged beyond all words, a frozen deserted ghetto of one. It was not snowing right now but there was snow everywhere, and pine trees, hundreds of feet tall. She was sitting against a ponderosa pine that smelled faintly of vanilla, and she was hungrier than she had ever been. There was only so much food in her pack, and it had to last seven days. The younger pines had tops that looked like pyramids. She decided to run off that night as far as she could and bury herself alive in the snow. There were five silent kids in her tribe. That’s what the instructors called it, a tribe, like they were Scouts, two Girl Scouts, three Boy Scouts. Maybe they’d make potato prints later. The girl was like having someone on your chain gang who screeched and sobbed and flung herself to the ground, tripping up and dragging down everyone else. Rosie imagined killing her before they headed out tonight. The three outdoor instructors were all huge woolly mountain men, and they followed you everywhere. This first full day Rosie held snow in her gloved hand until it turned to ice balls, and then threw them at one instructor like a pitcher. He looked back at her with kind and infinite calm. “The gift of patience,” he said, “is patience.” All of the kids acted out all day, but the instructors had a way of getting you pretty calm pretty quickly. The handsome boy, Tyler, punched the smallest instructor, Mike D., who was only six feet or so, and he just said, “If you hurt me, I still love you. Tyler? I still love you.” Tyler wrestled Mike D. to his knees, and tried to kick him with his boot in his face, but Mike D. caught his foot and pushed him off balance. “However, we will tackle you if you go nuts,” he said. Joel cried a lot in the beginning, like Rosie and the other girl, Kath, did, like when they were frozen solid or unable to learn the lessons the instructors taught, like how to set the traps made out of sticks. Joel was a meth-head junior from Chicago, small and ratty with bad skin. All the kids had exchanged whispered shreds of information and then gotten called on it because they were not allowed to talk to one another yet. This phase was called isolation, and the instructors said the idea was to throw you back on yourself. Tyler was black-haired and arrogant. Joel never looked anyone in the eye, but he was good with his hands and could make the traps. Jack was kind of a goofy Arlo Guthrie knock-off, who didn’t talk much but made funny googly-eyed faces. Kath was skinny and slutty-pretty with scraggly dyed black hair. There was no way she had done well in school. She flung herself onto her back like a turtle every fifty feet when they hiked, and they had to wait for her to get up, while they froze to death. She definitely needed to be here. They hiked for hours, lugging the hefty packs through the cold, heavy snow like prisoners of war, and Rosie laughed bitterly to herself, about her mother’s conviction that parenting was so hard, oh, oh, it was so arduous, like Bataan. Yeah, right. After a couple of hours, they made camp. All of them had to set up their own tents, using their tarps and trees, quite far away from one another. Even though she felt nothing for the people here, she hated the isolation of sleeping so far away from others. At the Parkade, you felt inclusion, you were locked into your people, but here the instructors were doing divide-and-conquer or something, so you got that when you’re so solitary, you’re also absurd. She was too tired to run away and kill herself the night of the first full day. By the second morning her skin had broken out and there was no mirror, so she picked at the zits and they bled. There were no combs or brushes, so you had to use your fingers or else your hair would start to dread. She should let that happen, plus let her nails grow long and black so that when they found her body, she would look insane from what they had done to her, like Howard Hughes at the end. Being here skanked you out. You could only take a billy bath, using a sock to wash yourself with water drawn from the river in billy cans. She was lonely as a loon, with an unfamiliar inside crazy laugh bubbling up from within. At the Parkade, your voices united together in a song, called We. Out here each person’s voice was thin and reedy and waiting to blow away. Elizabeth cried hardest at three every day, when school let out, even after James pointed out that Rosie came home in the afternoon only when she was grounded, and how rude or distant she’d be. Elizabeth threw up the first time she remembered that Rosie would not be home for Christmas, even after James reminded her how awful Rosie had been last year, withdrawn, spoiled, needing to be told two and three times to set the table, to ice the cinnamon buns and recycle the wrapping paper from her glut of presents. James tried to make Elizabeth stop crying, until he called his sponsor, who told him to get off her back. It was what she needed to do, and besides, something beautiful was being revealed. James told him, “I am never going to call you again,” but then called him that same night and asked him what was so goddamn beautiful about his wife’s broken heart. “Truth,” James reported to Elizabeth. He looked years older in three days, blackish-red half-moons under his eyes. With his reading glasses on, he resembled a little old man. Elizabeth lay on the couch petting Rascal like a post-lobotomy patient. James slid underneath her feet, and placed them in his lap, and pretended to chew on the big toe of her left foot through the sock until she laughed for several seconds. But a few moments later she was crying as if the sorrow came in on the same wave as the laughter. He made them both ginger tea. A moan of comfort escaped her. “I am temporarily semi-okay,” she said. They sat in silence, sipping their tea. “I used to drink this when I was pregnant with Rosie. I had the worst morning sickness.” She inhaled the scent. “Andrew was much happier than I was about having a child. I was afraid of how doomed you would be as a parent. And I was right.” Her reading glasses fogged up with steam, and she took them off and put them on the coffee table and screamed. The girls combed their hair with their fingers and braided it. This was one of the few things that calmed Rosie’s rabbity freak
ed-out mind, besides the sheer physical exhaustion. Every morning they broke camp, hiked, set up their tarp tents in a new site, gathered wood, and failed at fire instruction. The instructors said, “You’ll get it, we promise,” and the kids’ hands bled. Rosie obsessed about how long ago the first night seemed, the line of demarcation between all she had ever known and this new, alien existence. Time was all swirled up into a tangle, but she could still see the raggedy-ass cabin where this had all begun, the so-called SAR base, where she had been discarded by James and Lank. The cabin was used by search-and-rescue teams that operated in the mountains here. It was like a motel in the movies where all the promiscuous teenagers get killed. There was a box of shitty food for dinner, pita bread, peanut butter and jelly, granola bars, yogurt tubes. The instructors said, “Trust us. Eat the yogurt. You’re going to wish you had.” But all of them refused to eat, like six-year-olds. Hiking out that first night, Rosie had thought they would at least sleep cuddled together like freaked-out puppies, but instead they slept apart and she was scared to death all night. That night they got all their food for a week, which they were living on now—bulk hippie shit in plastic bags with twists, not even zip-locks except for the Kotex: oat flakes, powdered milk, raisins, dried fruit, sunflower seeds, bouillon, rice and lentils, and that was it. There was also this carcinogenic powdered-cheese product the instructors called “cheesy,” and a tin cup with a handle, sort of a tin bowl you could put over a flame. The second night the instructors made a big fire for all of them, but threatened that this might be the last time they did. They would need to start making their own, or live on dried fruit and cheesy. “So let us begin,” said the instructor named Tom. He looked like a basketball player who had gained fifty pounds and joined a militia. He told them to dig holes in the ground with sticks, and then gave them each an Altoids box with a hole in it, and a small square of red cotton. They put the cotton in the tin, and their tins on top of the fire. After a while, you could see a little flame poking out of the holes, and Rosie got two sticks, like the two instructors were doing, lifted her tin out like someone eating Chinese who didn’t know how to use chopsticks, dropped the tin into the hole she had dug, and then buried it. When she dug it out, the red cloth inside was black, and fragile, burnt but not ashen. It was called char cloth, Tom said, and he gave them waterproof plastic containers, smaller than film canisters, to carry them in. The instructors also passed out quartz rocks that the kids had found themselves at that day’s site, as well as steel handles, and showed them how to make a fire. Rosie did not pay attention to how you used the char cloth and tinder, the steel and quartz, because to do so would have indicated a willingness to participate in this charade. She was desolate, enraged, hating her parents, psycho- homesick, all these things at once. It was the worst she had ever felt, except for one time on acid when she had believed she was buried underground. She daydreamed endlessly of Fenn and her friends on the steps of the Parkade at night, definitely some of them looking druggy and vacant, like they had washed up on the concrete shore, but the others so happy and plugged in to one another and to the sense of ongoing transactions, and not just drugs, but stuff that filled and defined them: their music, most important; woven bracelets they tied to each others’ wrists; maybe a pipe; sometimes little things they had stolen, like turquoise jewelry, harmonicas. Under the sun and stars, just like here, but free and safe as carrier pigeons at their home lofts. Tyler got his fire going the fourth night, and the instructors showed them how to make rice and lentils in their tin camp cups, letting them use Tyler’s fire, and it tasted so great, though she hated to say so, especially with a bunch of cheesy on it, and sunflower seeds; she was starving. She loved it. She must be losing her mind. You stirred your food with a twig, and one of the instructors told them not to let the food stick to the cup, to wash the cup right away after eating, because they had to use it again in the morning for oatmeal, and anything you didn’t wash off was going to haunt you then. She lay sleepless in her sleeping bag, under the tarp she had tied to a tree, and she thought about dying in the cold, but mostly she thought about Fenn, his body so warm and tawny, his lips so soft and insistent, the feeling of sleeping in his arms. She wondered what it would be like to make love with Tyler, or get high with him, even on something legal, like salvia. She and Fenn had done salvia a few times because it didn’t show up on the urine tests. You could buy it right in town, over the counter at any head shop in the county. It was a legal herb, in various concentrations, on the shelves in the store right across the street from the bus kiosk on the north side of the Parkade. She got so depressed thinking of her old life, way back in history, like last week. Her heart was like a little dead animal. What had she done that was so terrible that her parents had to ship her to this place? Later she calmed herself, because she had to stay strong; she had to put on her game face tomorrow, try to start a fire, try to get released as soon as possible. She replayed great Ecstasy nights in her mind to hypnotize herself, replayed entire tennis matches, tennis lessons with Robert, sitting together talking in the grass by the side of the courts, acid trips, French finals, making love with Fenn, movies, meals. Salvia was sort of ridiculous if you thought about it. She and Fenn and Alice had taken it together. Jo had never done it—it hadn’t really been around when she was using. Plus now she was so into collecting her NA plastic key rings. You smoked salvia in a bong. You used a butane jet lighter so you could suck in the maximum smoke possible. It was totally legal. If you took five times extract, 5X, you went cartooning, but it left you on earth, which was totally a blast. With 10X you were still on the planet, but the planet had changed a little, for the better, a yellow brick road and a gingerbread house, really fun. And with 40X, you were ripped out of the world for a minute. It was so great. God, what if someone could get hold of something here? She and Tyler could get high together, under the white stars that broke through the black sky like the flames in their Altoid boxes. For some reason the first twenty-four hours of her being here were never far from her mind. In the morning, the instructors had cooked oatmeal with raisins over a fire Tom had made, and powdered milk, which was basically foggy water, and then they broke camp. Rosie had memorized every detail of the hike from the SAR base to the first campsite, committed every detail to memory, because she was going to run away. A girl Rosie knew had snuck out of wilderness in Montana and hitchhiked home. Her parents hadn’t made her go back. Rosie and the others had to write in their journals for an hour every day. She marked off days on the back page like a prisoner. Up at dawn, breakfast, filtering water in the Nalgene bottles, breaking up the old camp, learning wilderness skills and lore from the instructors, trying not to die of the cold, hiking to the next site, setting up the new camp, listening to the wilderness instructors, waiting for Bob to arrive. Bob was pretty cool, actually. He was a therapist who came around lunchtime every day, occasionally with baked treats from women who worked in the office back in town, and the kids got to talk to him for an hour. He looked to be in his thirties, maybe forty, not as tall as Rosie, with gray hedgehog hair and wide, thoughtful brown eyes and wire-rimmed glasses. She ranted about Fenn with him, about what a rip-off this was, about her perfect grade-point average, and how she missed her life, how much she hated her mother and was going completely crazy, how her mother and James had taken acid when they were first together, how she’d found her mother drunk on the bathroom floor a few years ago, how she could feel the hair under her arms growing in like a wolf’s. She told him how afraid she was of going crazy, and asked when could she call Fenn and Alice and Jo, which turned out to be never, although they could write, and she could respond the second month, when they were inside the hogan by the river. She’d see her mother and James in three weeks. She told Bob she had been sort of in love with her teacher Robert, had taught him tennis all summer and fantasized about going to bed with him, and how Fenn had come along and saved her from that. Robert had a wife and all these little children—it would have been a complete disaster for everyone. “But
weren’t you able to see on your own what a terrible idea it was—and so, not do it?” “We’ll never know now. I think he wanted it, too.” “It’s common for high school girls to fall in love with young teachers. It doesn’t make you a bad person. But it also doesn’t mean Fenn saved you—except he actually helped you fail more quickly.” “What if I kill myself with a sharp stick?” “You wouldn’t be able to, at least not for another couple of weeks when we give you knives. We care that you want to damage yourself. We know how it is to have such feelings. We want you to learn to live with those feelings without having to hurt yourself.” “Fuck you. I’m going to smoke dope as soon as I get out.” “We’re not drug bounty hunters. This is a place where we try to leave you off better than we found you. That’s all we can do. And no matter what, we love you.” Elizabeth was in severe physical withdrawal, feeling as strung out and tweaked as when she had stopped drinking. Her hands trembled off and on during the day. Jungle drums beat out their message of needing a fix, needing time with Rosie. She could not get songs and jingles to stop playing in her mind, “Didn’t She Ramble” for a whole afternoon, and the jingle from Mr. Clean. She would get to speak to the therapist, Bob, on the eighth day, and he would read her a letter Rosie had written. But not knowing whether Rosie hated her forever, whether she was near death from starvation or cold, plagued her every thought. She felt scooped out, eviscerated, wispy, and dazed. It was rather amazing that after everything they had been through, the different kinds of drugs, the lies, the sneaking off in the night, all she wanted was Rosie. Elizabeth was any junkie coming down; craving had entered her brain and was not going away. It was a sharp, pointed, immovable force, just like not getting the substance your body and mind were crying out for—nicotine, booze, sex, coffee. The voice of craving was extended, high-pitched, but muffled. She felt helpless as a bug. “This is a bottom for you,” James told her. “And that means there is a chance things can rise. We could have lost her. She had become insane.” He held Elizabeth in bed until she fell asleep, which was after one, even though she had taken a pill. On the fifth night, Rosie made fire. She spent that afternoon slogging through the snow searching for sticks. It was getting colder. She called out her name every single minute, like the instructors had told them to. She was seriously numb but ended up with an armful of sticks and twigs. The sun was going down. Tyler’s fire flickered thirty feet away. She tried to find her own ingenuity and bedrock, as Bob had talked about; he told them that if they did not give up, they would find it. He had promised. Kath keened and pounded the ground in between her efforts to start a fire. The instructors had shown them how to do it a few times, and they could all make embers of their char cloth. But Rosie could not make fire. The sunset was orange in the white sky between the pines. Her stomach cramped with the thought of warm rice and lentils going down, with cheesy. She squinched her toes to try to get some feeling back. She made a fire nest. First she wrapped a thick hank of grass around her thumb and twisted it the way she twisted her hair into a messy bun after combing it with her fingers. She laid it on the ground, shredded tinder—dry leaves and pine needles and twigs—and tamped these down into the nest. Her knuckles were scabbed from all the times she had tried to get fire going before. You had to take your gloves off so you could feel the quartz strike the steel handle just right, and your hands froze, but it was good to have frozen hands in case the quartz sliced into your skin. Her nails and skin were nearly black. Jo and Alice would die if they saw her hands now. Alice got her nails done every two weeks, short and French-tipped. Rosie took the steel in her right hand, and the quartz in her left. Then she put the bit of char cloth on top of the finest shredded grass in the nest. She struck downward as hard as she could. When nothing happened, she struck downward again, and again, smashing the steel in her right hand against the quartz, over and over, listening to the click amid the pine trees, until she was out of breath and her knuckles were bleeding. Finally two sparks flew off the steel and onto the char cloth on her tinder bundle and a wisp of smoke appeared, but died. She kept going. Her body warmed, and then she was sweating like a pig, and it was dripping onto her nest, so she moved her head so she wouldn’t put out the sparks, and one landed on the char cloth and there was another wisp of smoke, like a tiny bird’s snowy breath, but it went out, too, and her own breath dissolved into the freezing-cold air, and she kept striking the quartz and rivulets of blood trickled out of her knuckles. She shook the sweat off her brow, stretched her aching neck, and prepared for one final strike. She smashed the steel down against the rock, and a spark began to glow on the char cloth, nestled in the nest on the ground. She dropped everything and bent down to fold her nest in half, like an open-faced sandwich of spark and smoke and grass. She continued to blow on it, barely exhaling at first, then breathing softly like a mother blowing on her child’s poison oak, and she did not stop until the spark and smoke and tinder bundle turned into flames. On the sixth morning, Elizabeth first noticed that it was sort of lovely with Rosie gone. There was no tension, no metallic vibe, no mean glances, no wet towels on the floor. She read the paper over a cup of coffee by herself in the thin sunlight pouring through the kitchen window. She went outside in her bathrobe, stood still in her garden until the air, moist and cold, slapped her—Wake up, wake up—like after a hangover. Almost everything had died in the cold except the California stuff that was always there, purple flowers, myrtle maybe, funereal lilies, weedy daisies, muck, mush, and grass. The grass was fresh green with old dead stuff underneath. There were two tiny roses, one alive and one dead. In the middle of the live one, a deep peachy pink throbbed, the petals lighter and lighter as they gradually scalloped out. The dead one was ivory and sapped, like a used tissue, but still beautiful because it held its shape. Ah, note to self, Elizabeth thought, sitting down in the dirt: Hold your shape. The earth was damp but she sat still anyway. A red-tailed hawk hovered in the sky not far away. Really red, she thought to herself. That’s a dye job. After a while she went inside to get ready to go to a protest rally with Rae at San Quentin, where there was to be an execution that night. Joan Baez was going to sing by candlelight sometime in the hours before midnight, but Elizabeth would miss that part: James had an essay due, and she had promised to edit it after dinner. So whatcha got for me today?” Bob asked. Rosie was dreaming again. They all were. She told this to Bob. “I forgot what it’s like to dream. It’s like being Alice in Wonderland.” “With THC in your system, you don’t dream. And you need to. Otherwise it is like losing one of your senses. Dreams are part of your wholeness.” “Why?” “Because when you’re dreaming, you’re not the one calling the shots. So it’s a reprieve.” The instructors made them keep track of their dreams in their journals. Tom, the tall, heavy one, said, “There is a lot of power in your dreams—hopes, fears, truths.” Hank, the instructor with the goatee, told them that the dream world had rules in it. You couldn’t read a clock in your dreams. It would not give you the time. If the lights were on in a room, you could not turn them off in a dream. She woke up from food dreams, double cheeseburgers. Some of the grease had dripped and she woke up licking her forearm. It was so real. She wanted that taste of salty grease so badly. Bob told her that in indigenous tribes all over the world, the dream world was like church. She used to dream: she could remember bolting from nightmares and gasping them away, desperate to get back to her normal crazy daily routine. Every day Bob was willing to hear whatever dirt any of the kids had going on anyone else, mostly Kath, whom they all had a hard time understanding, and besides, she was a whiny pain in the ass and brought them all down. You could admit to that, if you tried to respect her anyway, for doing everything they did, even the steepest hikes and dressing on the coldest mornings, eventually. “Let me hear what you got,” Bob would say. “I hate it here so much I can’t even say it in words. I’m so furious I could die.” “Rosie, look. You’re mad because you made a choice to be stoned all the time, to hang with an older guy with a drug problem, and to fail. You and he agreed to lie and
cheat and steal to stay stoned, even though your parents said they would send you away. Your choice to do that is what is making you mad.” The only way to warm up during the day was to move around, but you didn’t want to when it was so cold. The cold was like daggers, even in the heavy all-weather Search and Rescue gear. Kath kept flinging herself onto her back like Yertle the Turtle and screaming that she wouldn’t walk one more step. The wilderness instructors would say nicely, “I hope we can get to our site before dark.” The other kid would start to shout at her: You pussy! We’re just trying to get to where we’re going. Get up. Start hiking. “I’m going to run away while you’re sleeping, you brown-nose losers,” she would reply. No one had ever made it a mile, the instructors explained to Kath. She’d be lost instantly, she’d just go around and around in circles, and they would find her. Plus, the program was the second-largest employer in Davis, so if somehow she got to the road—which was unlikely—anybody who picked her up would either work for the program or have a relative who did. This made Rosie smile unexpectedly and think of Rae, who saw the world that way: Everyone was on God’s payroll, whether they knew it or not. Everyone was part of God’s scheme, having been assigned to either help you or drive you crazy enough so you’d give up on your own bad plans and surrender to God’s loving Love Bug ways. She was plagued by thoughts of her future, ruined now by her parents’ behavior: What decent college would take a girl who had missed her senior year? Was she supposed to go to some ordinary college now? Be any old person? No, that couldn’t happen—it would mean they had won. Early on the sixth night, at dusk, the instructors had them go gather wood for a communal fire, and then select a staff-shaped piece. This would be the truth stick. Bob came out that night, and they had their first truth circle, only Kath went to hide in her tent and brood. They took turns burning symbols on the truth stick with a heated nail—moon, flames, a primitive eagle, their names. Bob taught them about how to do an emotional rescue, when you went to help another person by showing up and handing them the truth stick, so they all went over to Kath’s tarp and handed her the stick. She was sitting with Hank and crying like a baby, but she took the stick, and then joined them at the fire; she burned her name into the stick. They all said why they thought their parents had put them here, drugs and alcohol, and in Kath’s case, a boyfriend with hep C with whom she had shared a needle. “But only one time!” The boys tore into her about being an idiot, and Rosie thought she was lying, that she had used a needle with the sick boyfriend more times than she could count. If it had been Rosie, it would have been way more than one time; crazy but true, not that she had used needles, or ever would, probably. They tried to get Kath to tell the truth, but she was in total denial. Bob was right, Rosie thought, remembering something from the other day: Trying to reason with an addict was like trying to blow out a lightbulb. Elizabeth still felt skewered by cravings for Rosie, but things were ever so slightly better. Rae was getting her out. They had gone shopping at the local garden store, which was having a sale on bark nuggets and mini bark nuggets, with which she would need to blanket the garden when the weather turned really cold, but she could not decide which to buy, bark or mini bark, and they left rattled and empty-handed. Then, in Rae’s car, she could not remember how to roll the window down. The button was on the panel between the bucket seats, but it took her a few minutes to remember this. She and Rae drove by the Parkade, hoping that the kids would look as insane and vacant as usual, and some of them did, and this helped, but a few looked lively and young and free. Bark or mini bark, she kept thinking, bark or mini bark? Elizabeth chewed and sucked on the knuckle of her thumb, as if to extract marrow. It hurt. Rae did not say anything. Elizabeth suspected a conspiracy between James and Rae, to let her feel like shit for as long as it took, instead of trying to fix the unfixable. But Rae usually cracked under the strain of holding back comforting words and advice, as she did now: “You get to talk to Bob, soon! And you get a letter from Rosie. In the meantime, we know where Rosie is, and that she’s safe.” Relief flooded Elizabeth’s nerves, and the anxiety on Rae’s face subsided. “You know one thing I may be getting used to, Rae? You know one thing I sort of like about not having Rosie underfoot?” “What’s that, baby?” “Call me crazy, but I love not having someone endlessly challenging me, and making me feel like a crazy shit all the time.” Elizabeth looked around in the car with wonder. “I’m pretty sold on that.” Every morning at dawn someone shook them awake in the dark, time to get up, and some mornings the instructors handed out pepperoni or cheese sticks that had mysteriously appeared in the night. Every morning her heart sank when she woke and found that she was still in the woods. She obsessed about Fenn and knew he had left her. Maybe ninety days from now, when she was back home, he would leave the new girlfriend for her, if he had one. Or she could wait in a lovely way for him to cycle through, and arrive back at where they had left off. Not knowing was making her lose her mind, so she made herself think about what her friends were doing right that minute, and how great it would be to smoke a joint, and about her bucket kids, the littlest ones playing in the tall grass. She wondered whether the parents of her Sixth Day kids knew she’d been sent away, and whether they were upset that such a bad person had been in charge of their children. She wondered whether she could ever work there again, with this on her record, although what sort of record would this be on? The county Bad Persons ledger? And how about the parents of the other high school seniors—were they horrified to find out she’d had to be sent away? Or were they jealous, that her parents had done what they couldn’t? There was no ease in the snow, just plodding and clomping ahead. It found the imperceptible cracks in her Search and Rescue gear, and managed to splat in there. It was squeaky on the soles of her boots, and thudded when it fell from the branches. She felt like a speck of protoplasm on a stick under the sky. You always needed to squint, and this made your eyes hurt. Sometimes the snow was fluffy and light like feathers—how could anything so pretty make you feel so bad? Other times it was heavy and wet. The gloves were supposed to be good enough for the Arctic, but you were so cold you felt your hands were made of skeletal corpse-bones because none of your fingers could work together. But it was better than not feeling them, which meant you were in trouble. Trying to warm them up was agony, rubbing your big paws together, but it helped. The tips of their noses froze, and they rubbed them with the back of their frozen gloves like lepers. On the seventh day, Bob did an incredible thing. He showed up with candy, peach gummy rings. You tied a piece of floss to the ring, and then the other end to your middle finger, and held the ring about six inches from your mouth. You had to focus on the ring and how badly you wanted it, and make it come to your mouth without moving your finger. “There are tiny muscles in your fingertips that you’ve never noticed you had, because you never needed to,” Bob said. “Your mind is in contact with that which will help you move the floss in a circle, until the ring passes by your mouth and you can eat it.” It was true, like a Ouija board, how without your fingers’ even seeming to move, you could get the muscles to flicker, tremble, stir, and bring you the ring. Bob said: “There is so much you have all been ignoring inside you, that you let die in yourselves, deep psychic muscles. You used your skills to get high, to get by, to maintain whatever illusions you needed to keep using.” He let them each try the rings five times, and they could all do it, could get the string moving in a circle, and each got five candy rings. Their moods were expansive as they laughed and chewed and marveled. “What other flavors do you like?” he asked when he left that day. It was ridiculous—gummy rings as some sort of payout for their neglect and misery. Oh, well, what ev: “Watermelon and lime,” she called out one second before he disappeared. “You got it. See you tomorrow, then.” They all got to their feet and waddled on, like toddlers, or old people worrying about breaking their hips. There were so many ways to get hurt—fall on the treacherous surface and twist your ankle, or plunge through the ice that crunched underfoot and drown. Whatcha got for me today?�
� Bob asked. She didn’t want to say. Last night she had felt psychotic in her sleeping bag, although she had not made a sound, just thrashed and moaned. He coaxed it out with his patience and his kind face. “I’m going crazy here. My mind is like a horrible yammering, so noisy and miserable. Being here is destroying me. I’m afraid the cold will freeze me, but it will be so seductive that I won’t fight back. That I’ll die alone. Or go crazy and hurt someone. I’m afraid my mother will die while I’m gone. That if I let up, I’ll go nuts.” “We’re all afraid of the same stuff. Mostly we’re afraid that we’re secretly not okay, that we’re disgusting, or frauds, or about to be diagnosed with cancer. Really, nearly everyone is, deep down. We want to teach you how to quiet the yammer without drugs, and TV, danger, et cetera. We’re going to teach you how you can create comfort, inside and outside, how you can get warm, how you can feed yourself. And even learn to get through silence.” “There is no quiet place in me to rest, especially in all this snow.” “There is, though. There is wilderness inside you, and a banquet. Both.” Elizabeth sneaked off to the library to use the computer there. She rarely felt the need to go online. She could use a computer in a limited way, and James had just taught her how to Google, but today she didn’t want him to find out what she was looking up. Logging on, she felt like a pedophile looking over her own shoulder, heart pounding. She Googled “deaths at wilderness facilities, from exposure, suicide, violence.” She found a few mentions of death by neglect at army-style boot camps in the United States, and endless diatribes against wilderness programs in general. But she also found testimonial essays by kids who said they would have died without intervention, or ended up in jail or as runaways. Then she Googled “teenage traffic fatalities”: six thousand kids had died nationwide the previous year. She would have thought more. Then she looked up Greyhound schedules from San Francisco to Salt Lake City. Then she Googled James, and with held breath read responses to his radio essays, most of them complimentary, a few effusive, and a few fully demonic. She Googled the people who had written the most wrathful letters, but didn’t find anything actionable. She Googled Rae: her website, random praise for her weavings, and displays of her public successes. Then she Googled herself: nothing. That pretty much said it. What had she been expecting? Elizabeth Ferguson, stay-at-home mother and wife, recovering alcoholic with a history of psychiatric problems and a teenage child recently institutionalized for drugs, spends her days reading, ruminating, and playing with the cat. “Where were you?” James asked when she returned home. “Oh, just hanging out at the library.” After dinner the phone rang. When Elizabeth picked up, a woman with a sultry voice asked to talk with James, and Elizabeth’s mind flared with panic. He was having an affair. She’d been right all along—it wasn’t that KQED was his mistress: he’d been seeing someone young from the production department. Or who waitressed next door to the station. “Can I help you?” Elizabeth asked with enormous hostility. It was a woman from the valley, with a dog. Someone had come by who could take him, but she had promised James he could have first dibs. “Really,” Elizabeth said. “First dibs.” She felt busted—here she’d leapt to the conclusion he was having an affair, when he’d just been out dog hunting. God, maybe she’d been wrong about the extent of Rosie’s dark and secret life, too; maybe she and James had overreacted, and they could go pick her up. Then she smiled kindly to herself, and remembered the Post-it: Tomorrow. She handed him the phone. “It’s a lady with a dog,” she said. He grimaced with guilt, took the phone and listened. “Oh, dear,” he said. He looked over at Elizabeth. She kept her expression neutral, although she was seething—he’d gone to check out a dog behind her back. Their family was in deep shit, they were broke and overwhelmed, but he was saying to the woman, “Boy, Ichabod is a great dog. I fell in love with him. But I had no business pursuing this, and I have to say no. Thank you for checking, but we’ve got way too much going on.” Elizabeth looked away, looked back at James in his guilt, and grabbed the phone. She clenched her teeth. “Wait,” she said into the receiver. “Let us at least come by in the morning. Is nine too early? Let me find a pen.” Then she turned to James and mouthed, “Ichabod?” He nodded with deep contrition. Rosie was raw all the time but she plodded on. Her nose ran and froze, and she tried to rub it away and that rubbed her skin raw. You sniveled all the time here. The snow turned you into something pathetic. It made your horrible leaky self visible. On the seventh night they all got to write to their parents. Bob was going to call the parents tomorrow, and read the letters over the phone. They could use one whole side of a page of binder paper. And the parents could fax them a letter the day after. Rosie thought for a long time before she began to write. It was so weird, how friendly she felt all of a sudden. Mama, who gave me life, she wrote. I am okay. I hated you for the first few days. I know you think you sent me here to save me. Although I think this is pretty extreme and I am still very mad. I miss you, though, and Rascal and James (sort of) and Lank and Rae. I want to come home. I would be so good, you could test me every morning. I know it is too late but I feel very desperate. Please find out from Jo or Alice about Fenn, even if it is bad news for me. I didn’t use NEARLY as much as the other kids here. Never meth. Well, once or twice. They say I get to see you and James at the end of the month. Please smuggle Rascal in your biggest purse. It is so cold here you won’t believe it. And at night it is so quiet that it is like hearing music among the planets (if there are owls in outer space). The snow is beautiful and a nightmare, and I will never voluntarily go into snow again. It looks like clouds and smoke and fog, and it burns the inside of your nose and lungs. It has incredible shadows in it and is also full of light. Every so often we see jackrabbits frozen in motion behind the trees. They look like they are judging us. (Tell James he cannot use this stuff!) Love you, miss you. Give Rascal a treat for me or a smack on the butt. Rosie. The first thing Bob said to Elizabeth was, “Rosie is healthy—doing fine.” “Fine? What does fine mean?” At her AA meetings, FINE was a common acronym for fucked up, insecure, neurotic, edgy. “It means she’s eating, she’s learned to make fire. She’s doing her chores.” “Does she hate me? Does she hate us?” “No, no, not at all. Listen to this letter. I’ll stick it in the mail later so you’ll have the original. You can each fax one letter a week, as can any adult in her life. Except Fenn. Here it goes: ‘Mama, who gave me life.’ ” Elizabeth clenched her fists in sudden joy. When Bob finished, neither of them spoke for a minute, until he broke the silence to say he would fax her and James a copy later. After they got off the phone, she went and curled up on the couch, beneath where Rascal lay. He stared down at her like a vulture in a tree. James came over and took her feet in his lap and rubbed them with her socks still on. Ichabod lumbered over and planted a huge, heavy, hairy leg across her chest so that she couldn’t have gotten up supposing she’d wanted to. It was hard to say or even guess what kind of dog he was, but he was mellow and large, maybe eighty pounds, with short brown fur, orange eyebrows like a rottweiler, and hanging folds of skin around his jaw, like a shar-pei. Pearly mist covered the garden when she went out the next morning, and her baby rose was already dead, and no new ones had bloomed. The willow tree branches, without leaves, were sticky, witchy fingers. There was broad green grass, and grass like sparse old-lady hair. The yard was not hospitable now, but lovely in its way, full of green gray brown. It was not neat and efficient, though. It was taking its time. Ichabod sat near her, a solemn blur of dark. He watched her have her morning cry. Then they got up together and went inside. On day eight, the beginning of the second week, the day Bob was going to read Rosie’s letter to Elizabeth, the fax machine at the office broke down, so he couldn’t fax it to Elizabeth, too, so she could read it to James later. Rosie spent all afternoon trying to hold back tears, feeling she would freak out entirely, like Kath, with whom she had bonded in the last few days. The kids muttered with paranoid thoughts about how the instructors were fucking with them—what were the odds the fax was broken today, when they were supp
osed to get letters from home tomorrow? As they murmured angrily together, Rosie felt strangely close to the other kids. Tyler, who was not only handsome but smart; small Joel, whose skin was about eighty percent better; goofy Jack, the quiet, googly Arlo kid; and Kath—they had each other’s back. If one of them got called out for slacking off or doing something stupid and potentially dangerous, they all exchanged glances of commiseration and of what general dicks adults could be. Bob said that if the machine wasn’t fixed tomorrow, he would drive into town to retrieve their parents’ letters at Kinko’s. Then he told them he had a surprise for them later, after dinner. Rosie was fire-maker for the whole tribe that night. She got a roaring fire started. Kath still hadn’t made one, but now was at least trying. Rosie and Kath had helped each other finger-comb their hair that day, and plotted how to steal some duct tape from the instructors so they could wax each other’s eyebrows. They pooled their rice and lentils with the boys and cooked the food in one battered pot that Hank gave them. They sat in a circle with their instructors, gobbling it down under the thinnest slice of moon that could ever be. At the business store in Landsdale, a young man tried to help Elizabeth fax Rosie her letter, full of details about the new dog and how much they missed her, and how much she’d scared them, and how proud of her they were. But something was wrong with the recipient’s fax, and the young man promised to keep trying until it went through. Elizabeth went to visit Rae. She pounded on Rae’s door over the sound of the loom and then, without hearing Rae’s voice, stepped inside the cottage. It smelled of lanolin, fiber, and wet wool. Rae looked up from the loom in the middle of the small living room. It seemed as big as a grand piano. Elizabeth came up behind Rae to kiss and nuzzle her soft, sweet-smelling neck. Then she sat in the window seat to watch, and dreamily imagined Rosie reading her letter again and again. Rae, shoving the comb downward through the warp, looked somewhere between harp-playing and rowing, as she dragged the woolen thread down. “Can we drive up to Utah when you’re done, and get my Rosie back?” “Sure,” said Rae, running the threaded shuttle through the warp. Then she smote her forehead with the palm of her hand. “Wait—shoot. Never mind. This tapestry is due tomorrow morning. Besides, bringing her back might kill her.” Elizabeth thought this over. “Finish up already. I’m bored to fucking death.” Rae held up five fingers: five minutes. Elizabeth let her shoulders slump and sighed loudly, and went back to daydreaming about Rosie. “Did you get your letter off? And how’s the dog?” “The fax machine in Davis was down. The entire town has probably been wiped out in an avalanche. And the dog is sweet. Ugly-adorable. Except for the penis.” “That red lipsticky thing? Or the whole furry outside situation?” “James says that the furry outside thing isn’t the penis—it’s a cod-piece. It’s just his little underpants.” Rae rolled her eyes. “Thanks for sharing, James. I’ll have Lank Google it.” Elizabeth stared. “Really, Rae? You can Google that?” Rae shrugged, nodded. “Isn’t it wild, how you can find out so much, yet know so little?” Rosie whipped her head around to the sound of voices in the woods. “Listen,” she said. The kids looked at one another with fear. What was it? They gaped toward the sound of crunching boot steps on the ground, on ice and branches, but then heard other kids’ voices, and the instructors could not keep straight faces. Maybe it was over, Rosie thought, her heart hurdling over itself. They had learned their lesson—God almighty, had they learned their lesson—and now they were going home. Six teenagers in orange Search and Rescue gear stepped out of the woods, followed by two huge male instructors and a woman. The new kids, three girls, three boys, were all smiling, and reached for Rosie and the others, who had clustered around. After a while these new kids shepherded Rosie’s tribe over to the fire. They’d brought them brownies from someone in the office and a chub of pepperoni. “We are your emotional rescue,” one of the boys announced. “The isolation phase is over, and from now on, we’re going to check on you every week, no matter where we are in our own process.” Rosie’s whole body flushed. “You mean, we’re not going back with you?” “Of course not. You have three more weeks out here, then two more months to go. We have one more week, and then we move to the hogan and the longhouse, and then Academics. We’ll come visit you from there. And in another week, you’re going to visit a new tribe who will be on their eighth day, as their emotional rescue, because you’ll be old-timers by then. We’ll be your mentors, and the newer ones will be your mentees.” “We brought food and ourselves,” one of the girls added. “Plus, the truth. That we’ve been in your shoes, we uniquely know how bad this week was, and we swear it gets better.” What a bunch of mental cases, Rosie thought. I wonder what the instructors are paying you—thirty peach rings? They’d obviously drunk the Kool-Aid. She wouldn’t let that happen to her. She looked around until her eyes landed on the woman instructor, who was brown-haired and homely in the firelight, talking quietly with Kath, who was laughing, and Rosie’s heart broke with longing for her mother, but she refused to cry. She froze herself out, cauterized the place where she wanted to sob, and drew in the dirt with a stick for a few minutes. And then the woman came over and sat beside her. She was prettier up close, with a cute smile and dark eyelashes, but she had a big nose. “Hey,” said the woman. “You’re Rosie. I’m Taj. I’m with the kids who are two weeks ahead of you.” Rosie looked at her and nodded but couldn’t think of anything to say. She had a nice smell, with a hint of something womanly, like lotion. Rosie hadn’t smelled a clean female in more than a week. “I wanted to tell both you girls, we’re sorry about the Kotex, but you can let Bob know when you have your period and we’ll help you get rid of the used napkins at the end of every day. I know it can be kind of gnarly.” “Then why didn’t they just give us Tampax, that we could bury, and have some privacy?” Taj sighed, shook her head. “About two years ago, a girl here hated it so much that she left one in for days, to induce toxic shock—so she’d either get to go to the infirmary or die.” Rosie stared at Taj, and let her mouth drop open. “Death by tampoon?” Taj nodded enthusiastically. “Now I have heard everything,” said Rosie. Taj laughed and put one arm around Rosie’s shoulder, and Rosie let her draw her in, and she buried her nose in Taj’s neck and smelled it as long and deeply and quietly as she could, holding on to the smell like a life preserver and trying to hold back tears. “You’re going to end up being glad for this experience,” said a boy with red curls poking out from under a navy blue watch cap. “I know it’s hard to believe.” That was a good one. Rosie grew hard and imperious. Then the aroma of chocolate wafted over. It smelled so much like her mother’s kitchen that her mouth began filling with desire. “It starts getting more interesting for you tomorrow,” said the curly-haired boy. “Now that you know how to survive, you get to be a family, a community. In another week, you start learning Search and Rescue. We’ve got our first real assignment tomorrow at dawn, joining forces with the local SAR squad and firefighters.” Rosie took off one of her gloves and reached for a brownie. She could see the cracks in its surface by firelight, like dried desert. The inside was wet, moist, exquisite. Search and Rescue, that was another good one. As if adults would trust a bunch of loser kids to rescue something precious out here in the middle of nowhere.
Anne Lamott Page 11
